Pink Floyd and Michel Foucault: A match made in heaven

Last week I covered excerpts from “Discipline and Punish” by Michel Foucault with my students in Contemporary Sociological Theory. We spent most of the class reviewing the concepts in small groups with the help of this worksheet. We focused in particular on how institutions like monasteries, boarding schools and prisons train people to become highly disciplined “docile bodies,” and the implications of this phenomenon for society. Towards the end of class, we watched Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” video. See if you can find examples in it of what Foucault would have called “disciplinary technologies!”

I research, write and teach as an Assistant Professor in the Sociology and Anthropology department at Howard University. My work focuses on social movements, environmental justice, agriculture, toxics and climate change. I also run Voices from the Valley, a website featuring environmental justice advocacy in California's San Joaquin Valley.